BY OSBORNE HART
DETROIT—Unforgivable Blackness is not a boxing film. And it is more than a documentary about the life and times of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion. The film tells part of the story of the national oppression of Blacks, and the racism used to justify it—both grounded in the historical development of American capitalism.

Through this well-researched narrative of Johnson’s life, at the time of the U.S. capitalists’ ascendancy and expanding international might, one gets a view of U.S. society where the Black nationality is relegated to second-class status by virtue of the color of its skin and subject to the racist system known as Jim Crow.

The documentary also covers Johnson’s early life. Johnson’s parents were freed slaves. During the Civil War his father served in the North’s Colored infantry. He was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, a year after the last Union soldier withdrew from the former Confederacy, marking the defeat of Reconstruction. By age 13, Johnson worked on the docks. There he learned to box and had his first fight for money to supplement his wages.

By that time, the late 1890s, the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan nightriders and lynching of Black men were commonplace.

Boxing was known as “The Sport” even though there were other professional sports, most notably baseball. In Jim Crow America, all sports were segregated. “The Sport” was considered the pinnacle of athletic prowess. The championship of the heavyweight division was solely a “white man’s” preserve. Johnson fought his way, with skill and adeptness, to become the “Negro” heavyweight champion in 1903.

Johnson was not satisfied with that title. He pursued the heavyweight belt, publicly demanding a fight with Jim Jeffries, the reigning champ. Jeffries ignored Johnson, vowing never to fight a Black. In an unprecedented act, Jeffries retired to avoid a match with Johnson and risk relinquishing the crown to a Black man.

A round-robin of bouts established Tom Burns, a white Canadian, as the new champion. Johnson defeated him in a 1908 match held in Australia. After the 14th round, Sydney cops jumped into the ring and stopped the fight. All cameras were turned off to “spare” the world the “spectacle” of a Black man knocking out a white man. Filming of fights was a regular occurrence and the footage was shown in movie houses, the pay-per-view of those times.

During the year that Johnson became the heavyweight champion, there were scores of lynchings of Blacks in the United States.

The film shows that even in retirement, Jeffries was still considered by many whites to be the “real” titleholder. The search for a “great white hope” was on. It would be two more years before Jeffries, lured by a record money purse—$100,000—and “restoration” of the title to whites, came out of retirement to fight Johnson. The date was set for Independence Day, July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, for “The Battle of the Century.” The Chicago Tribune called the match “a contest between the white man’s hope and the black peril.”

Whites in the front rows among the 16,000 attending the fight shouted “coon,” “Ethiopian,” “nigger,” and other racial slurs. Johnson pounded Jeffries for 15 rounds, retaining the championship.  
 
Racist reaction to Johnson victory
Blacks across the United States celebrated the victory with a sense of pride and newfound self-confidence. Racists reacted with marauding mobs attacking Blacks in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Houston, New Orleans, and other cities. In a construction camp in Georgia, racists shot three Black workers to death. Nationwide 26 Blacks were officially reported killed and hundreds injured during the anti-Black riots.

The big-business press in every major city—Chicago, Detroit, New York—egged on the white supremacists. “We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy,” the New York Sun forewarned. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times entitled, “A word to the Black Man” threatened, “Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not be puffed up. Let not your ambition be inordinate or take a wrong direction. Remember you have done nothing at all. You are just the same member of society you were last week. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration, and will get none.”

Johnson had pride and dignity and was aware of his worth as a human being. He was quoted as saying to reporters that whatever they write, to just include that, “I was a man.” That was his appeal to and inspiration for the Black masses living under Jim Crow America.

His extravagant lifestyle and companionship and marriages with white women blatantly disregarded Jim Crow rules. Interracial marriage was a crime in 36 states.

Johnson was routinely demonized and reviled in press articles, not only by whites, but some Blacks as well. Most notably, Booker T. Washington scolded Johnson for not staying in his “place” as a Black man.

The Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) campaigned to frame Johnson. In 1913, under the Federal Mann Act, known as the anti-prostitution white slavery law, Johnson was wrongly convicted and sentenced to prison. He fled, becoming an international fugitive for seven years.

Commenting on the campaign against Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in the August 1914 NAACP Crisis magazine, “Boxing has fallen into disfavor…. The cause is clear: Jack Johnson…has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it with little brutality, the utmost fairness and great good nature…. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is black. Of course some pretend to object to Mr. Johnson’s character. But we have yet to hear, in the case of white America, that marital troubles have disqualified prizefighters or ball players or even statesman. It comes down, then after all to this unforgivable blackness.”

After Johnson’s frame-up conviction, there were bills drafted in Congress to make miscegenation a federal offense. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation premiered in movie theaters around the country. The film lauded the virtues of the Ku Klux Klan, falsified the history of Reconstruction, and portrayed Blacks as savages lusting after white women. It ran for 46 weeks on Broadway.

President Woodrow Wilson held a private showing of the movie for his entire cabinet. The movie “teaches history by lighting,” Wilson remarked. The Supreme Court also viewed the movie. The NAACP mounted a national protest against the film.

Johnson, past his prime and out of condition, fought Jess Willard April 5, 1915, in the heat of Havana, Cuba. Johnson lost in round 26. The next Black to win the title was Joe Louis in 1937!

In 1920 Johnson returned to the United States to serve his one-year prison term. He received a hero’s welcome by Blacks. At 68 years of age Johnson died in an auto crash in 1946, in North Carolina, a year before Jackie Robinson broke the Jim Crow barrier in major league baseball.  
 
 
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